Topological pressure and the variational principle for actions of sofic groups

There are a variety of results in the literature proving forms of computability for topological entropy and pressure on subshifts. In this work, we prove two quite general results, showing that topological pressure is always computable from above given an enumeration for a forbidden list inducing the subshift, and that for strongly irreducible (SI) shifts of finite type, topological pressure is computable. Our results apply to subshifts on all finitely generated amenable groups with decidable word problem and generalize several previous results which applied only to Z d -subshifts. As corollaries, we obtain some results related to ground state energy and entropy, proving that the map sending φ to sup μ ∈ M σ ( X ) ∫ ϕ d μ is computable/computable from above when P X ( ϕ ) is, and that the map sending φ to its ground state/residual entropy is computable from above when P X ( ϕ ) is computable. We conclude by giving explicit bounds on computation time of P X ( ϕ ) in the Z d setting for SI subshift of finite types and locally constant and rational valued φ, and show that in the special case X = A Z 2 , this algorithm runs in singly exponential time.

We introduce a discontinuous and non-additive version of the topological and measure-theoretic pressures for flows. A corresponding variational principle for topological pressure is studied. To this end, a conditional variational inequality, the ergodic and non-ergodic versions of the mass distribution principle and an inverse variational principle are deduced. Besides, we give some characterizations of our pressures, which also include a comparison between the continuous and discontinuous versions of pressure. In addition, we compare our variational principle to another variational principle given in the literature.

Sofic groups were defined implicitly by Gromov and explicitly by Weiss. All residually finite groups (and hence all linear groups) are sofic. The purpose of this paper is to introduce, for every countable sofic group G G , a family of measure-conjugacy invariants for measure-preserving G G -actions on probability spaces. These invariants generalize Kolmogorov-Sinai entropy for actions of amenable groups. They are computed exactly for Bernoulli shifts over G G , leading to a complete classification of Bernoulli systems up to measure-conjugacy for many groups, including all countable linear groups. Recent rigidity results of Y. Kida and S. Popa are utilized to classify Bernoulli shifts over mapping class groups and property (T) groups up to orbit equivalence and von Neumann equivalence, respectively.

In this paper we consider a bootstrap class $$\mathfrak {C}$$ of countable discrete groups, which is closed under countable unions and extensions by the integers, and we study actions of such groups on $$\mathrm {C}^*$$ -algebras. This class includes all torsion-free abelian groups, poly- $$\mathbb {Z}$$ -groups, as well as other examples. Using the interplay between relative Rokhlin dimension and semi-strongly self-absorbing actions established in prior work, we obtain the following two main results for any group $$\Gamma \in \mathfrak {C}$$ and any strongly self-absorbing $$\mathrm {C}^*$$ -algebra $$\mathcal {D}$$ : In fact we establish more general relative versions of these two results for actions of amenable groups that have a predetermined quotient in the class $$\mathfrak {C}$$ . For the monotracial case, the proof comprises an application of Matui–Sato’s equivariant property (SI) as a key method.

<p style='text-indent:20px;'>In this article we study the centralizer of a minimal aperiodic action of a countable group on the Cantor set (an aperiodic minimal Cantor system). We show that any countable residually finite group is the subgroup of the centralizer of some minimal <inline-formula><tex-math id="M1">\begin{document}$ \mathbb Z $\end{document}</tex-math></inline-formula> action on the Cantor set, and that any countable group is the subgroup of the normalizer of a minimal aperiodic action of an abelian countable free group on the Cantor set. On the other hand we show that for any countable group <inline-formula><tex-math id="M2">\begin{document}$ G $\end{document}</tex-math></inline-formula>, the centralizer of any minimal aperiodic <inline-formula><tex-math id="M3">\begin{document}$ G $\end{document}</tex-math></inline-formula>-action on the Cantor set is a subgroup of the centralizer of a minimal <inline-formula><tex-math id="M4">\begin{document}$ \mathbb Z $\end{document}</tex-math></inline-formula>-action.

In a paper entitled cocycles and spectra Helson and Par ry prove that for every T there exists a q~ such that V ~ has Lebesgue spectrum, moreover q~ can be chosen to be real, i.e., taking values + 1 and 1. The purpose of this paper is to extend this result to certain actions of countable groups which includes ergodic non-singular actions of countable abelian groups. We blend the method of Helson and Parry with the notions of weak equivalence and weak von Neumann transformations. In section 3 and 4 we discuss these results in connection with systems of imprimitivity. The problem of extending the result quoted above to countable groups was raised by H. Helson to one of us. It is a pleasure to acknowledge his interest and encouragement in this work.

We prove that for actions of a discrete countable residuallyfinite amenable group on a compact metric space with specification property, periodic measures are dense in theset of invariant measures. We also prove that certain expansiveactions of a countable discrete group by automorphisms of compact abelian groups have specification property.

This thesis is dedicated to studying the theory of entropy and its relation to the Kolmogorov complexity. Originating in physics, the notion of entropy was introduced to mathematics by C. E. Shannon as a way of measuring the rate at which information is coming from a data source. There are, however, a few different ways of telling how much information there is: an alternative approach to quantifying the amount of information is the Kolmogorov complexity, which was proposed by A. N. Kolmogorov. The Shannon entropy is the key ingredient in the definition of the Kolmogorov-Sinai entropy of a measure-preserving systems. Roughly speaking, the Kolmogorov-Sinai entropy is the expected amount of information in `Shannon sense' that one obtains per unit of time by observing the evolution of a measure-preserving system. In topological dynamics, the topological entropy takes place of the Kolmogorov-Sinai entropy. For metrizable systems, the topological entropy measures the exponential growth rate of the number of distinguishable partial orbits of length n as n tends to infinity. Originally defined for Z-actions, the 'classical' theories of entropy were later extended to actions of amenable groups. We provide a necessary background on amenable groups, topological/measurepreserving dynamics and the entropy theory in Chapters 1, 2, 3 and 5. The main focus of this thesis is extending the following results. First of all, a common generalization of the topological and the Kolmogorov-Sinai entropy theories for Z-systems was suggested by G. Palm. We provide an abstract generalization of the work of Palm for actions of discrete amenable groups in the language of measurement functors in Chapter 6. Secondly, we investigate the connection of entropy and Kolmogorov complexity. Originally, the equality between the topological entropy and a certain quantity measuring maximal asymptotic Kolmogorov complexity of the trajectories was established by A. A. Brudno for subshifts over Z. Later, he proved the equality of the Kolmogorov-Sinai entropy and the asymptotic Kolmogorov complexity of almost every trajectory for ergodic subshifts over Z. We provide a generalization of these results as follows. Firstly, in Chapter 4 we give a background on computability and Kolmogorov complexity and, further, introduce computable Folner monotilings, which are central in our extensions of Brudno's results. We treat the 'first' and the 'second' theorems of Brudno in Chapter 7. The first theorem is generalized for subshifts over computable groups admitting computable Folner monotilings, while the second theorem is proved under the assertion of regularity of the monotiling, which we introduce in Chapter 7 as well.

A new approach to actions of countable amenable groups with completely positive entropy (cpe), allowing one to answer some basic questions in this field, was recently developed. The question of the existence of cpe actions which are not Bernoulli was raised. In this paper, we prove that every countable amenable groupG, which contains an element of infinite order, has non-Bernoulli cpe actions. In fact we can produce, for any$h \in (0, \infty ]$, an uncountable family of cpe actions of entropyh, which are pairwise automorphically non-isomorphic. These actions are given by a construction which we call co-induction. This construction is related to, but different from the standard induced action. We study the entropic properties of co-induction, proving that ifαGis co-induced from an actionαΓof a subgroup Γ, thenh(αG)=h(αΓ). We also prove that ifαΓis a non-Bernoulli cpe action of Γ, thenαGis also non-Bernoulli and cpe. Hence the problem of finding an uncountable family of pairwise non-isomorphic cpe actions of the same entropy is reduced to one of finding an uncountable family of non-Bernoulli cpe actions of$\mathbb Z$, which pairwise satisfy a property we call ‘uniform somewhat disjointness’. We construct such a family using refinements of the classical cutting and stacking methods.

This book contains a collection of survey papers by leading researchers in ergodic theory, low-dimensional and topological dynamics and it comprises nine chapters on a range of important topics. These include: the role and usefulness of ultrafilters in ergodic theory, topological dynamics and Ramsey theory; topological aspects of kneading theory together with an analogous 2-dimensional theory called pruning; the dynamics of Markov odometers, Bratteli-Vershik diagrams and orbit equivalence of non-singular automorphisms; geometric proofs of Mather's connecting and accelerating theorems; recent results in one dimensional smooth dynamics; periodic points of nonexpansive maps; arithmetic dynamics; the defect of factor maps; entropy theory for actions of countable amenable groups.

There is no compact metrizable space containing all continua as unique components

We show that all amenable, minimal actions of a large class of nonamenable countable groups on compact metric spaces have dynamical comparison. This class includes all nonamenable hyperbolic groups, many HNN-extensions, nonamenable Baumslag–Solitar groups, a large class of amalgamated free products, lattices in many Lie groups, A ~ 2 {\widetilde{A}_{2}} -groups, as well as direct products of the above with arbitrary countable groups. As a consequence, crossed products by amenable, minimal and topologically free actions of such groups on compact metric spaces are Kirchberg algebras in the UCT class, and are therefore classified by K-theory.

Existence of a measure with maximal entropy (that is, an invariant measure whose measure-theoretic entropy is equal to the topological entropy of the system) is an important subject in dynamical system theory. Weak expansiveness of the dynamical system, including h-expansiveness and asymptotic h-expansiveness, provides a non-trivial sufficient condition for existence of such measures. In this paper we give new characterizations for weak expansiveness of actions by amenable groups, by interpreting equivalently topological conditional entropy of such actions using either topological entropy of subsets in the sense of separated and spanning sets or ideas of Bowen’s dimensional entropy of subsets. Our results extend not only the well-known results about weak expansiveness by Bowen (1972, 1973), Marczyńska (1977) and Misiurewicz (1976) from single transformations to amenable group actions, but also a recent result relating topological entropy to Bowen’s dimensional entropy for amenable group actions which was proved first by Zheng and Chen (2016) using measure-theoretic methods and then re-proved by Dou and Zhang (2018) via purely topological tools.

Slow entropy type invariants and smooth realization of commuting measure-preserving transformations

We find conditions which guarantee that a given flow Φ on a compact metric space X admits a Lyapunov 1-form ω lying in a prescribed Cech cohomology class ξ∈H ^ 1 (X;ℝ). These conditions are formulated in terms of the restriction of ξ to the chain recurrent set of Φ. The result of the paper may be viewed as a generalization of a well-known theorem by Conley about the existence of Lyapunov functions.